Chinese Art: Modern Expressions comprises papers and commentaries from an international symposium held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2001. The publication brings together research by leading scholars on a variety of topics pertaining to Chinese modern art and encompasses a number of methodological orientations. Although the papers stay within the conventional time frame for China’s modern period, that is, between the mid-nineteenth and the third quarter of the twentieth century, they individually and collectively negotiate a nuanced reading of the period predicated upon shifting paradigms and fluid geocultural boundaries. David Wang’s paper, “In the Name of the Real,” is a literary historian’s analysis of Xu Beihong, one of the most influential proponents of realism in the 1920s and 1930s. Years of training in the French academic system convinced Xu that verisimilitude, structured composition, and narrative clarity were the primary criteria for painting, indeed, the only worthy paths for modern Chinese painting. Giving voice to his detractors, including the poet Xu Zhimo and the painter Lin Fengmian, Wang exposes Xu Beihong’s anachronism and obstinacy. After critically reviewing Xu’s art, the author launches a more objective evaluation of his brand of realism, elaborating on its aims with...